Their Sun Sets
by triffickie
Summary: She hadn't known God made people like that but now it's time for somebody to carry the ashes. Almar Jr gen.


**their sun sets**  
fandom: brokeback mountain  
character(s): alma jr  
rating: pg  
disclaimer: Annie Proulx wrote the original story and obviously thus created them and I make no profit and all that jazz.  
word count: 1,058  
summary: Somebody has to carry the ashes.  
notes: This is largely/mostly based on film canon.

---

She stops at a gas station, but doesn't pump gas. There's a scrawny teenager behind the counter whose voice is so high-pitched, it reminds Jenny's screaming on the phone.

"I really think you oughta come with me."

"I'm too busy."

"He's your father too."

That was when Jenny started screaming. About their mother, and how daddy died before Jenny's wedding. As if it he'd planned to die without seeing Jenny get married. As if he'd planned it.

The teenager draws her a map on a back of a postcard. She flips it over and studies the photograph on it. She's seen the picture before.

"Cool," she says and looks at the clerk. "Thanks."

--

She doesn't remember meeting Jack Twist.

She remembers sitting in the car, holding Jenny's hand and being glad Jenny was too young to ask questions. Later, Jenny grew up and asked her a lot of questions. Some she could answer, so easily, going by the things she learned at church and at school. Some she didn't even want to answer.

She doesn't remember a face, or a voice. She remembers a presence. Her mother crying against her. Dad packing up in a hurry. The thing that broke everything apart.

She doesn't remember meeting Jack Twist, but she wishes she did.

--

She only has a couple of hundred miles to go when Kurt calls her on her cell phone. She doesn't want to answer. The last row is too clear on her mind.

"The cost of cremation these days, sure it's high-tech but--"

"This was my father, Kurt!"

A snort. "Like he was ever truly there for you, Alma. Like he ever was."

He _was_, she thinks and answers the phone, faking happiness and surprise.

"Hi, honey!"

It's going to be okay, she knows.

--

At first she didn't know how to fit it in with everything, this thing with Jack Twist and all those other things her dad hid in his silence. That unfortunate character trait of saying too little, she always thought that was the thing that broke up his marriage with mom. She now realized, that wasn't it. It was Jack Twist.

She hasn't talked to mom about it. She hasn't talked to Jenny about it. She's afraid of the reactions, knowing they'll be like her initial one. The moment when all the pieces started fitting together, she was shocked, disgusted.

She had been in the trailer, putting together his past belongings. She spotted the shirt and the postcard, souvenirs of Brokeback Mountain. It happened then, holding onto that damn shirt with the bloody cuff. She doesn't know how, but she just _knew_, understood everything in that single moment and she felt sick.

Above everything, she was just confused, though. She hadn't known God made certain people this way.

At the funeral she was angry. She hated him. How could he have done this? Done everything, to mom, to her and Jenny, completely ruining their lives. And then left earth, never having the guts to tell her, to confess everything. All those times he just kept quiet, just because she didn't know what questions to ask. How could she have known what to ask, she didn't even suspect nothing. She shook with fury and Jenny held her, thinking she was crying.

She was like that for days until her anger finally died down. After that she felt numb and regretful of her hatred. She prayed for God to forgive her, to forgive him, that he may find himself in Heaven, not Hell.

It may have been a false hope but it felt good, calming.

She asked God why she'd never known the Lord made people like that. She just hadn't known.

--

She listens to the radio while eating a candybar and thinks about pleasures.

If a man wants pleasure, he can buy some from a hooker, she always figures. Not that she's ever thought it's right or proper to do that, but the possibility is out there, she guesses.

Her dad and Jack Twist weren't about pleasure, she knows, just because she knows her dad. It's what makes it so difficult for her to understand. Her dad isn't what she's seen on TV about homosexuality. It wasn't like that at all. It doesn't fit in what she knows about the world.

She's not ready to accept it, but she is willing to deal with it. It happened. It was. Somehow, it still is.

Jack Twist is still a presence. A ghost in the living-room. She finishes her candybar and hears a song end on the radio. For a while, the car is silent.

For a moment, everything feels all right.

--

"You'll need a horse to go up there," a man tells her the next morning, after a badly slept night at a crappy motel. "Can you ride one?"

She can.

"I'll give you a map to the camp. If it's still there."

Thank you, she thinks, doesn't say it. A part of her just wants to go back.

But stories need their conclusions. 

--

Riding the bay-colored mare up the mountain, she feels strangely calm.

There's a bit of Jack Twist in Ennis Del Mar, she suddenly understands. It doesn't wash off. It never will.

She's doing the right thing, she decides.

--

The mountain is beautiful. She's standing on it and looks around her with a ceramic pot in her hands.

The breeze is steady as she opens the pot and begins scattering the ashes of her father. The ashes go with the wind, dispersing onto the ground, the trees, the bushes.

She walks back to the camp and pours the remaining ashes near the old camp fire. She stands still and is quiet for a minute, two. She doesn't pray, doesn't need to.

She buries the shirts somewhere close by, but keeps the postcard. She wants to be able to recall this moment. The mountain looks beautiful and she thinks about the surroundings as they were or might have been 40-50 years ago. Perhaps they were exactly the same.

Every story deserves a conclusion.

--

When she drives away, the sky is blue and the clouds a very bright shade of white.

She thinks about symbols, about Brokeback Mountain.

How nothing can move it, how nothing ever will.


End file.
